When comparing SendGrid vs phpList, the Slant community recommends SendGrid for most people. In the question“What are the best services for sending newsletter/marketing emails?”SendGrid is ranked 5th while phpList is ranked 7th. The most important reason people chose SendGrid is:

SendGrid offers amazing analytics and reports. You can check which messages are delivered, which are marked as spam and much more. SendGrid also lets you download the data in order to look through it locally.

Pros

Pro

Excellent analytics

SendGrid offers amazing analytics and reports. You can check which messages are delivered, which are marked as spam and much more. SendGrid also lets you download the data in order to look through it locally.

Pro

Great support for beginners and experienced users

If you are just getting started with email marketing and transactional emails or if you get stuck somewhere, SendGrid includes amazing videos and guides to help you work out any problem you may have. What's more, it also has phone, chat and email support available 24/7.

Pro

Both newsletter and transactional emails

Usually when choosing a service to send your application's emails you need two. One to send the newsletter or news and promotions from the marketing team and the other to send you application's automatic emails and messages.

With SendGrid you don't have to choose two because it doubles both as a transactional and marketing platform at once.

Pro

Easy to use API

The API is very easy to use and very intuitive. On top of that, the documentation for the API is complete and very useful, covering everything you need to know.

Pro

Has a free tier

12,000 free e-mails per month.

Pro

Sends millions of messages

Can manage millions of subscribers and send millions of messages per day.

Pro

Free and Open Source

This software is licensed under the AGPLv3.

Cons

Con

Not suitable for people without a technical background

There are some features which are missing by default from SendGrid (sign-up forms or follow-up messages just to name a few). In order to implement those in your emails, you need to know how to program because you have to code them yourself through SendGrid's API.

Con

Can't view contents of sent emails

They do not capture the sent emails. This means you cannot check that the email was sent correctly, and it makes it harder to debug issues that arise.

Con

No sandbox/test mode

Does not support test keys that can be used to check integration with SendGrid and that cannot be used to send real e-mail out. It means that either you don't cannot verify that your integration with SendGrid works during development, or you have to use real credentials which should not be shared widely across your team.